Kobo’s new Aura HD, billed as the Porsche of eReaders, is available for pre-order now in North America and it will be on store shelves in Canada and the United Kingdom starting April 25.

The Aura HD, the newest addition to the Kobo lineup, was announced at the London Book Fair and reaction, says Michael Tamblyn, Chief Content Officer at the Toronto-headquartered company, has been positive so far.

“We couldn’t be happier with the response,” Tamblyn said in a phone interview from London where Kobo, which is now owned by the Tokyo-based Rakuten, announced the launch of its luxury eReader.

“We wanted to do something for the person who wanted the best possible reading experience,” said Tamblyn. “We gave that as a challenge to our device team and to our user experience team. We said, ‘go and talk to our customers and find out what it is they would like to see next.’

At $170, the Aura HD is definitely at a premium price point in a market where consumers can pick up budget eReaders such as the six-inch WiFi-connected Kindle at under $100 and Kobo’s own five-inch Kobo Mini eReader now reduced to $60.

However, Kobo sees the Aura as filling a niche for the truly passionate readers among its customers.

“We expect this is for a specific part of our customer base,” said Tamblyn. “This is for that most passionate reader who has two or three books on the go at a time, the people who before they moved to digital had a giant pile of books on their bedside and now they are carrying thousands of books on their eReader.”

While Kobo may not precisely be a David to the giant Amazon’s Goliath, the eReader market is hotly competitive and dominated by Amazon, plus it faces increasing pressure from the ever-expanding tablet market.

Tamblyn suggests his company is meeting that market challenge with its range of offerings. Tha range now extends from this week’s high-end Aura eReader to the Arc, Kobo’s answer not only to Amazon’s Kindle Fire but to the growing seven-inch tablet space, which includes the likes of Google’s Nexus 7 and other tablets in that range.

And look for Kobo to expand its digital content, already available for a range of devices, including iOS, BlackBerry, Android and others. With the launch of the Auro, Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis also talked about his company’s plans to launch its own app store to deliver content for Kobo devices.

Tamblyn points to Kobo’s strategy of partnering with booksellers as key to its expansion.

“What has allowed us to compete in what is possibly the most competitive space I have ever seen is that we have grown through partnerships,” he said. “Our model is to expand into a new territory by helping a local bookseller, a bookselling chain to provide a digital experience to customers that already have a relationship with that retailer.

In Canada, that partnership is with Indigo; in the UK where the Aura was announced Kobo has a partnership with WH Smith.

“Rather than treating this as a revolution that happens to booksellers we want it to be one that happens with booksellers,” said Tamblyn.

“It is a very different model than some of our competitors but it has allowed us to grow very quickly.”

Tamblyn said there is demand for magazines in a digital format that deliver the same richness of design found in the printed versions and demand as well for ebooks for children and youth, for graphic novels and comics.

Tamblyn doesn’t see eReaders as an either/or choice for consumers when compared to tablets and his company’s research seems to bear that out.

A survey of 10,000 Kobo customers found that 36 per cent who owned a tablet also had an eReader. And 14 per cent of customers who use Kobo on their tablets plan to buy an eReader.

“We see people moving back and forth between those two devices as they find the device that is best for the particular kind of reading they do,” he said.

I can see Aura finding a home on the bedside tablets and in the purses and briefcases of the most avid bibliophiles. I agree with Tamblyn, who suggests that there isn’t one product that fits all when it comes to ereading.

“Even though people have a camera in their cell phone, people who really care about photography have a high end digital SLR,” he said. “It is sometimes simplistic to say all of this is going to converge in one device.”

It comes in three colours: ivory, espresso and onyx. It supports nine languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Portuguese, Japanese. You can load books on your Kobo borrowed from your public library and the Aura has other Kobo eReader features such as Reading Life that lets you track your reading stats and share your reading data and news on your Facebook Timeline.

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